


timekeeper

by ricciardos



Category: Formula 1 RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Charles Leclerc needs a hug, M/M, MY FIRST EVER WORK WHAAATTT, actually its more like 3/4 angst with a dubious happy ending, but its still racer pierre so, but then again dont we all, journalist charles was a concept i really wanted to explore, so pick your poison i guess, there are some other names sprinkled in there but i didn't want to clog up the tags, you know how it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23820433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ricciardos/pseuds/ricciardos
Summary: Charles Leclerc has always considered himself to be a rational person. He needs a 10 step plan and comprehensive list of conversation starters, each one practiced and perfected with his best friend Alex before he even thinks about approaching the one person who has meant more to him than every photograph he’s ever taken.Just this once, he lets himself slip.
Relationships: Pierre Gasly/Charles Leclerc
Comments: 13
Kudos: 59





	timekeeper

Charles Leclerc is cautious. 

Maybe cautious isn’t the right word. Rational, he thinks, would be more apt to describe the limbo state of mind he constantly finds himself in. 

Charles Leclerc is a journalist. A photojournalist. Every week, month in month out, he flies to different parts of the world to photograph what can only be touted as human suffering. Scenic poverty, he calls it. Poverty preserved in film, shot with a camera that colours the trees and bodies more vividly than they actually are. 

Some people think his job is horrific, sometimes even bordering on ethically wrong. Charles likes to think of it as art. 

Art, when these photos hit the screens of international peace meetings, sending a collective murmur through the audience. Art, when the pictures of the Syrian war are put in frames to hang at galleries. Art, when those who come shed a tear at the monstrosities of what happened in Myanmar. 

Art, he concluded, was supposed to make you feel things. 

Pierre Gasly, was something like art. 

Charles had forced himself not to think of Pierre for a long time. As a journalist, he had learnt to keep certain memories of war and human tragedy repressed at the back of his mind. 5 years, he thinks. 5 years since him and Pierre had gone clubbing in that disco-lit, Santa Monica bar. The night before Charles had left for Sudan. The tequila in front of him was just the right strength, but from the scrunching of Pierre’s nose it looked like it was a little too much. Sometimes, Charles wondered if he was like the tequila to Pierre. Too strong, the destructiveness of his nature too much for him to handle. 

That was a conversation for another night, preferably when he was alone and under the influence of a whiskey neat.

“You’ll come back to me, Charles?” The disco lights, jarring and bright, only showed themselves as soft bursts of light in Pierre’s eyes. That’s what Pierre did.

“Of course.” 

That was 5 years ago. 

Of course, Charles had come back to Pierre. But everytime he had to leave again, it got more difficult. Bidding someone goodbye on a trip for weeks on end with no guarantee of contact or survival was no longer as easy as downing shots in a neon lit bar, as they had done when they were 21. Bidding someone goodbye was hardly just a note with the words “safe trip” that Pierre left on the kitchen table with his breakfast bag on top. 

Charles had learnt the hard way that bidding someone goodbye was sex with tears running down their face the night before, touching, holding each other closer than they had ever done, with just the urge to be near each other. Bidding someone goodbye, was laying in the moonlit apartment along Avenue de La Costa, tangled in the sheets without saying a word, the worry reflected in the softness of his eyes and the shine of the tear that threatened to leak. 

Bidding someone goodbye, was finally snapping that they had enough watching Charles disappear every month, with no way of contact and no way of knowing whether or not he had been hit by a bullet. 

Charles watched Pierre pack his things from the bottom drawer of the single cabinet they shared, brain struggling to form the words he wanted -- no needed, to say. He might be a photojournalist, but writer he was not. Pierre was always the eloquent one of the two. He could whisper Shakespeare to Charles in the middle of the night, the words coming out like they were meant to be worn on his sleeve. Charles breathed the words Pierre spoke like oxygen. Now, when Pierre needed him to say something the most, he couldn’t even muster the bare minimum of opening his mouth. 

“I’ll come back to you. You know I will.” The words, when he needed them the most, tumbled out like a waterfall cascading down the side of the mountain. 

Pierre stopped packing. 

He looked up at Charles, his eyes red. Long gone were the red and green lights in the Santa Monica bar 5 years ago. 

“You don’t know that.”

From then on, Charles never saw Pierre again. 

\- 

Well, to say he never saw Pierre again would be inaccurate. 

Everywhere he went, he saw Pierre. 

The cafe they always used to have brunch on Sunday mornings. If he closed his eyes, he could smell the croissant Pierre always ordered. A true Frenchman. His, Frenchman. 

The post office, where Charles always drove Pierre to drop his letters off to his parents. 

The airport, where Pierre picked Charles up, always waiting with a snarky comment about his post-flight look before shutting Charles up with a kiss. 

Charles had kept those memories locked away in a section of his brain that was not to be touched, at least not while sober and conscious. 

Charles might be rational, but that doesn’t mean he is scarce of moments of indulgence at the expense of self-destruction.

Sometimes, every once in a while, he would open that Pandora’s box. Of course, it nearly always ends in tears and attempts to check out Pierre’s instagram to see what he’s been up to. 

It’s private, and his profile picture is a stock photo of him on the Brazil podium. 

-

After 5 years, Charles gets his first assignment out of the war field. Instead, he gets posted to a sector only accessible to a select group of photojournalists. 

The glittering race lights of Monaco. 

“Give the assignment to Russell, he’s a nerd for these things.

“Russell’s in China now.”

"Giovinazzi?”

“For god's sake, Charles, just do it. It’s literally a 15 minute walk from your apartment. Plus, a change of scenery would do you some good.”

Charles doesn’t know how to tell Mattia that it’s the crippling fear and anxiety that’s already begun to stir in his stomach from seeing his ex that’s keeping him from the track. 

Pierre Gasly. Toro Rosso driver. 

The name has a nice ring to it. 

-

Race day sees Charles wandering around the track, weaving through crowds of people in a daze. The Ferrari fans, he notes, are slightly more aggressive than the Alfa Romeo ones. Every once in a while, Charles brings his camera up, snapping magazine worthy snapshots of Lewis Hamilton and Daniel Ricciardo. He sets up camp at the photographers booth near Turn 13, but doesn’t register much throughout this whole process. 

Charles would consider himself a rational person. 

Well, mostly, anyway. 

Pierre was always the more emotional one of the two. 

But now, Charles can feel his senses heightened. This has nothing to do with rationality. This, has everything to do with the way Charles’s heart is beating abnormally erratic, the air around his skin electric and buzzing. 

Pierre is here. 

Charles doesn’t know how to process nor handle that. He is only strong enough to keep Pierre in the tendrils of his brain, floating around his neurons. He hasn’t heard his name spill from his lips in ages. 

When the lights go out, it turns out he is spared the overthinking. Mattia did threaten him that he had to come back with at least a few usable race shots. 

The rational part of Charles swallows the emotion like it never even surfaced, lodging it right next to his heart. 

-

When the race ends, Charles doesn’t know what to do. 

Find Pierre. 

Do not find Pierre. 

Hug him. 

Kiss him. 

Talk to him. 

Run away. 

Charles Leclerc is rational, but his brain swirls predominantly with the options that make close to no sense. 

One voice, remains louder than the others. 

Find Pierre. 

Charles Leclerc has always considered himself to be a rational person. He needs a 10 step plan and comprehensive list of conversation starters, each one practiced and perfected with his best friend Alex before he even thinks about approaching the one person who has meant more to him than every photograph he’s ever taken. 

Just this once, he lets himself slip. 

-

Charles walks past the Toro Rosso on the way out. His brain calculates the probability of it all, and in every single situation he’s ever thought about Pierre is in the garage. 

His rationality pays off, it seems. 

Sitting on one of the controller chairs facing the screens where data flashed during the race, is Pierre Gasly. 

Charles feels his heart flutter, drum, shatter, then fall back together again in a single second. 

Pierre, with his striking eyes that turn the most glaring of disco strobe lights into spots of soft light. 

Pierre, with his brown hair that could never quite stay down even after Charles tries his best to tame it. 

Pierre, with the smile that still makes Charles feel he can conquer anything even after 5 years. 

Charles can almost taste the tequila on the tip of his tongue, that Santa Monica night. Charles can smell the sweat from both bodies lying in the sheets the night before he had to leave for another assignment in Iraq. Charles can taste the saltiness of Pierre’s (or was it his?) tears when they kissed for the last time. 

Charles runs through the 5-7 conversation starters he’s run in his head on the way to the garage. All of them, it appears, have left him. He opens his mouth, waits for a syllabus to tumble out, but it never does. 

Pierre had always been the more eloquent one of the two. 

“You came back to me.”

“Of course.”

**Author's Note:**

> my first ever work! i'm super new to this whole f1 writing and this is a new style but hopefully it worked out okay. i wouldn't know. its one of those post writing drunken state of mind days again, where coherence is a gift. 
> 
> did i push my lit essay back to write this hot mess of a fic in one seating? i may be a fool, but i'm no coward. 
> 
> feedback, comments, kudos always appreciated! i’m @sainz-and-gang on tumblr :)


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